“Must Build Again”: A Love Poem for Hope and Resistance

Simin Behbahani (1927-2014) is well known and widely praised, both in Iran and internationally, for the innovations that she introduced into the classical genre of Persian ghazal (love poem). She is known for her philosophical reflection on the fate of human beings. Behbahani wrote about topical issues taking place in Iran such as the Revolution (1979), the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and various uprisings against injustice and against the use of religion for political purposes.

She has been celebrated as “the lioness of Iran” since she used her poetry as a powerful medium to speak out against oppression and injustice. (Apart from love, the Persian ghazal is used to express social, political and religious protest.) Behbahani’s poetry has been widely published and translated into different languages both inside and outside Iran. This blog is a brief analysis of her poem “Must Build Again”. My aim is to show how Behbahani evoked the feelings of “hope” and “resistance” in her audience.

Must Build Again

Must build again – You! Behold! Off we went,

Although we did not give up till – off we went.

You, the youngest, implore justice! May your world be replenished!

May God be the protector of this home! Behold, off we went.

You are the Christ of tomorrow to bring the dead to life;

We are the Moses of yesterday. With a staff – off we went!

It was all sincerity and faith -God knows-

If we did right or went astray.

Hands, chained; eyes, blind-folded

Tell where they took us; don’t tell where we went!

Friend-in-arms, we are excusable, although we lagged behind

In the middle of the way which we took with you.

We fell down like stairs. You rise like a summit!

Behold! We, too, reached the summits before.

We strove, a life-time, like the waves.

Sometimes we receded, sometimes we rose up.

When the cry of truth grew from the throat of the truth-seekers,

We cried out in harmony with it – off we went.

If we didn’t dare a bloody mission,

Letting out such a clarion call – off we went …

An Interpretation

The title of the ghazal, “Must Build Again”, is the prelude to Behbahani’s story. It is her first powerful attempt to demand her audience to keep their hope alive, an urge which flows through the whole poem. She uses a strong imperative verb, “must” build, which is further strengthened with the adverb “again” which by implication refers to the destruction of what already existed.

The first line starts with the title of the poem. Repeating the title strengthens the starting point of the poem. The line ends with the subjective pronoun “you”, referring to the youth. This word is emphasized to show the poet’s hope and faith in the younger generations. She talks about herself  and her comrades, who are gone while she refers to their tireless persistence in the past. Behbahani continues by directly calling upon the youngest children of the nation to ask for justice and equity as forces that can rebuild their “homeland”.

In the following lines, the iconic imagery is created by themes taken from Quranic tales. The first allusion is to the miracle attributed to Jesus, his bringing the dead to life. Here, the poet sees the youth as the “Christ of tomorrow” who must go beyond saving the nation. In fact, they must bring the dead back to life. She starts the line with her source of faith and hope: the youth. Behbahani also reverses the chronological order of events and starts with “tomorrow”. She then refers to the generation of “yesterday”, which gives more weight to the concept of hope.

The second allusion is to Moses and his staff. It was with this staffthat Moses miraculously cut the sea open to save his nation from the tyranny of the pharaoh. By embodying her generation as Moses, she implies resistance against oppression, which finally opened up the impossible to them.

The rest of the poem gravitates towards what Behbahani says about the efforts of her generation. She recounts the painful resistance against oppression in her tumultuous past to convince the reader to take care of her legacy left behind, the gift of hope. She refers to God as her witness to prove the sincerity of the attempts she and her comrades made. This probably refers to the opposition of the intellectuals against the dictatorship of the Pahlavi regime in Iran (1925-1979).

One can also read these lines as her confession of what she and her comrades considered piety in performing their religious duties in fighting against injustice. She asks the audience to recount the history of what happened to them because of resistance against tyranny. They were blind-folded and incarcerated. She talks to the comrades that she has lost. Through an apology, Behbahani laments her being left behind on the path which she took with them.

In the remaining lines, Behbahani returns to her talk with the youth, encouraging them to keep their hope to rise to the summit. She depicts the imagery of falling and rising. She talks about the summits of success that her generation reached: (probably) the downfall of the Pahlavi regime. Then she laments being downtrodden like “steps” after the revolution of 1979 when the intellectuals were killed and incarcerated. Behbahani explains that they joined the opposing forces of the tyrannical authority to support “the truth.”

She closes the ghazal acknowledging that she did not reach the elevated station of martyrdom, “the bloody mission” in support of the “truth”. However, she and those left behind, responded to the call to support the truth. She raised her voice and followed the current: she voiced her resistance by composing poetry.

Zhinia Noorian is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC Advanced Grant Beyond Sharia: the Role of Sufism in Shaping Islam in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. Image: Simin Behbahani Search media – Wikimedia Commons